America has a "civil religion," a la Rousseau, requiring anyone with aspirations to a public life (whether voluntray or not) to pay lip service, even if obviously insincere (as in Gates' case quoted below), to religion. It's not Christianity, more like Judeao-Christianity, and requires at least agnosticism about God, but does not require theists to believe that God is a person or a supernatuarl being. I used to have a friend training for the ministry who thought that God was "all that is highest in us." I used to argue that made her an atheist. She thought I was being perverse. Changing gears, when the district court judge I clerked for swore in witnesses, she always said, " Do you swear to tell the truth (etc.). . . so help you God?" I pointed out that the Constitution permits a witness to swear _or affirm_, and does not require reference to a divine being. (This was a concession to the Quakers, who traditionally will not swear.) She said, I'll make people ask for that. If you were to ask, it would probably completely discredit you, of course, or having called attention to the fact that you would not swear on God's name, at least unless you made it clear that you had religious grounds for not swearing. Me, I'm an atheist, but I'd swear. jks
Joe Smith <joseph.a.smith at verizon.net> wrote:It's possible that Bill Gates has professed aetheistic beliefs in other contexts, but in the Frost interview he comes off as a fence-sitter on the issue. Here he sounds like an agnostic. Never did like folks who can't make up their minds... :-)
joe
"Gates was interviewed November 1995 on PBS by David Frost. Below is the transcript with minor edits.
Frost: Do you believe in the Sermon on the Mount?
Gates: I don't. I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in. There's a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very very positive impact.
Frost: I sometimes say to people, do you believe there is a god, or do you know there is a god? And, you'd say you don't know?
Gates: In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid."
Jim Farmelant wrote:
>Well Bill Gates is no longer officially a CEO but
>he is a professed atheist, who has publicly
>admitted as such on several occasions including
>an interview on one of David Frost's shows a few years
>back.
>
>Jim F.
>
>
>
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